HKW Performance

Is it possible to grasp the world at the planetary-scale? Between the climatic shifts of the Earth, cultural, political, and economic tumult, the increasing entanglement of human culture, natural environments, and global-scale technologies is difficult to comprehend.

Our performance at Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin was a debut for the Ringmind audio/visual experience which attempted to address the "Life Forms" conference theme. It was also a unique performance in that the visuals and audio were live-coded using Processing and Supercollider. The visual artist on this project Ashley James Brown, worked closely with our small team of physicists to generate enagaging animated graphics. My own work employed various synthesis and spatial diffusion methods to realise the "sound" of planetary rings and moon systems that were displayed across an array consisting of 44 loudpspeakers. There was also a text element to the performance where Sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski created a dramaturgy to demonstrate the workings of the Ringmind.

We have secured further funding to develop an application to allow people to get a sense of this work on the web and on their mobile devices. Updates about this and further performances will be announced in due course.

To get a sense of the Life Forms conference themes you can visit this link.